What are Rhetorics?

"Television not only altered the ways in which public discourse was conducted, but it began to call increasing attention to the problem of what it might mean to be a 'public,' as well as to the problem of how public discourse was received and interpreted by the mass and multiple audiences that attended to it" (pp 8) 

This got me to thinking about how television has impacted political rhetoric (this and the recent debates).

This is the first televised presidential debate-


This is interesting commentary on the debate-



I believe the last point about the difference between the radio audience and the television audience is very pertinent to the above quote.

At the time of the first televised presidential debate, there was little research into how audiences received messages and no research about how audiences received political messages like debates on television.

At the time, the magic bullet theory (AKA the hypodermic needle theory), contended that whatever the media produced (like an advertisement or political message) was taken as fact and received wholly.
This is why some old television advertisements are so hokey-



Some contend that this misunderstanding of media's impact and power to be received, may play a very large role in the 1960 results.

In respects to the text, the approach to modern rhetoric in media is changing.
"In the modern worldview, the universe is a relatively simple, stable, highly ordered place, described in and reducible to absolute formulas that hold across contexts" (pp 11).
But, "By contrast, postmodernism prefers interpretation over scientific study because it operates with the assumption that all knowledge is subjective and/or intersubjective, morally culpable, and local. In the postmodern worldview, the universe is a rapidly changing, highly complex entity" (pp11).

In the context of rhetoric(mainly political) being filtered via media, we are in a period much like the 1960 election. This change in media being the Internet. It first began to reveal it's influence and power as rhetorical vehicle in the 2004 election through the sudden shift in popularity for presidential nominee Howard Dean. Dean's awkward victory holler quickly made the rounds online and possibly may have cost him the ticket.
This is the holler.


Here are a few examples of what happened.


and this,



and finally this,



Where television used to be a media vehicle that was modern, more stable and controlled, rhetoric is now in a new landscape that is constantly changing and uncontrollable.

I will end with this.
Marshall McLuhan is a media theorist(debatable) who had a few theories about television when it first came on the scene. He credited Nixon's loss to JFK to Nixon's coldness not translating to the hotness of television. His theories are becoming a bit more pertinent today than they were in the 1970s.

This is an interesting video about McLuhan and Youtube.



-Chris